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Forward, to the Past! – Episode III: Rebel Yell

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Or ‘American History X-Wing’

 

Yes, it’s the third and concluding episode in my trilogy of posts about Star Wars. I’m going to be making all sorts of generalisations about ‘America’ in this post. Please bear in mind, I don’t mean them to apply to all American people. Far from it. I’m talking about mainstream historical narratives, and the culture industries, and ideology, and so on. Also, in keeping with tradition, I’ve included an unnecessary and irritating (but also rather cute, if you’re honest) teddy bear. Oh, and in twenty years time I’ll come back and reissue these posts with crappy extra passages edited in for no good reason.

 

Three political categories dominate the Star Wars galaxy: Republic, Empire, and Rebellion. This is the arrangement in The Force Awakens just as much as in the original trilogy. Indeed, it is the apparent impossibility of telling a Star Wars story in which the galaxy is arranged any other way which determines the inevitability that The Force Awakens will be, and has to be, a ‘structre’ (as covered in previous episodes).

Galactic politics is in a constant state of fluctuation, but the fluctuation is between these three poles. Republic breeds Empire, Empire attacks Republic, Rebellion destroys Empire and restores Republic. And then the whole thing begins all over again. It unfolds with the inevitability of a Hegelian triad (but that joke isn’t funny anymore, so we’ll leave that there).

The three modes correspond to the way in which America conceives of its history and its future. America sees itself as always in a state of being one or the other, becoming one or the other, splitting away from one or the other, redeeming one or the other, fighting one or the other, falling from being one or the other into being one or the other. Left and Right agree on this, though they inflect it differently (natch).

Tied to this is the perennial idea of America ‘losing its innocence’ whereas, as James Ellroy put it: “We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception.” Interestingly, he still seems to think that a ‘fall from grace’ did happen.

Hollywood has been playing with these three categories for some time actually. What are the great Hollywood Biblical epics but negotiations of the political and moral valences of republics that become empires, and rebellions against empires. In Ben Hur, Spartacus, Quo Vadis, The Robe, Cleopatra, etc, there is Rome as the great republic-turned-empire, dominating the world; and there are the Christians and/or slaves bravely defying her. The Ten Commandments does something similar with Egypt and the Hebrews. Star Wars reiterates these old Hollywood testaments in many ways, most especially the prequels with the slaves of Tatooine (slavery exists in pockets alongside the benevolent Republic… notice and store for later use), and in the religiose choral moments in the score of Return of the Jedi.…

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Reviewing Doctor Who Episodes Without Having Watched Them: ‘Listen’

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This is, of course, another episode that all the usual Moffatistas praise to the skies.  Well, that’s fair enough.  All the Moffaty things they love are here.  Again.  And what on earth could possibly be wrong with wanting to watch exactly the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again?  I mean, Moffat makes lots of money writing the same things over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again, so obviously repetition is good, right?  Stands to reason. 

Also, such is the religious devotion that certain people have to this man that nothing thrills them more than yet another episode where Moffat sticks his hand up Doctor Who‘s arse and rearranges its guts to his liking… or (perhaps a better metaphor) meticulously works his way through a library of classics, scribbling ‘Steven Moffat is cleverer than the person who wrote this’ over every page.  And he is, obviously, because he gets big viewing figures and makes lots of money from being a Whovian capitalist.  The definition of artistic success, clearly.  …

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Random Thing #3

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And one more.  Please bear in mind, this is a fragment.

Marx saw creativity as essential to human nature.  He famously once said that “Milton produced Paradise Lost in the way that a silkworm produces silk, as the expression of his own nature”.  The difference is that Marx saw such creativity as a potential in all people, and believed that class society stunted such potentials in the majority by forcing them to do work that was alien to their natures. 

Yet there is some truth to the idea of progress in the history of class society.  Marx is quite comfortable – sometimes a little too comfortable – with the idea that the accumulation of capital can also be the accumulation of progress, that even the imperialistic development of class society can push people ‘forwards’.  It’s just that he also sees horror in the process, eventually calling the ‘progress’ that British imperialism and capitalism brought to India as resembling a “hideous, pagan idol, who would not drink the nectar but from the skulls of the slain.”  This is far from an unproblematic way of putting it, but the point stands. 

It is a point later taken up by Walter Benjamin in On the Concept of History, in which he describes history as both a triumphal procession and a great piling up of wreckage and horror. 

Moral progress is only found when the increase of power and knowledge is used to make life fairer or better for common people (i.e. the majority), and this is the exception rather than the rule.  And when it does happen, it isn’t a trickle-down effect.  It is the result of struggle from below.  And even the accumulation of power and knowledge in the hands of the rulers can only come from the unrequited labour of the masses.  Even when a genius makes an individual discovery, he usually sits on top of a great pyramid of unacknowledged workers.  Charles Darwin was only able to spend years in his study working and thinking and writing because he had servants, inherited wealth, and a wife who was related to the Wedgewoods.  And that’s the history of class society at its prettiest.  At other times it looks like Alexander, invading and slaughtering.  Alexander was one of those potentates who poured the fruits of human labour into makewaste vanity projects like wars and great opulent buildings for the top people.  Contrary to the assertions of classicists (who tend to assume that they would be reincarnated in the past as fellow aristocrats) Alexander achieved little to better mankind, even if he was taught by Aristotle, one of the undoubted ‘great men’ of history.  But then Aristotle himself defended slavery in his Politics, as he had to, given that his leisure to sit around all day thinking depended on it.

Terry Eagleton has frequently pointed out that the Marxist view of history as simultaneously progressive and barbaric is a Tragic one, as Tragic (with a capital T) as Othello.  He asks (rhetorically) if even communism (as Marx envisaged it) would justify the necessary slog through class society. …

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What can I do but cheat?

Three moments, not in chronological order.

1

Barbara Wright is in a junkyard.  She walks into a Police Box.  She’s in a large, brightly lit control room.

This can happen on screen because of the cut.  The material conditions of TV production, manifested as a splicing together of two recorded moments into the appearance of one fluid event, makes this possible.  We have “discovered television”.  We can put huge buildings inside small boxes.  We can put Narnia inside the wardrobe; Wonderland inside the rabbit hole.  The quintessential trait of British fantastic literature for kids – the eccentric relationship of impossible spaces – can be made visual.

Doctor Who‘s very nature as storytelling is utterly bound up with the limits of the material conditions of television production.  So much so that living on that limit became its raison d’etre.  Its development has always been inextricably connected with what can materially be done, and how it is done.  And what it has done has always developed what it wants to be able to do next.  As I’ve said elsewhere, ‘The Space Museum’ pushes the show onto a new track, politically speaking… and it does this partly because the aesthetics of the show – which stem from the limits and capabilities of material TV production – crunch up against an allegory about empire.  This sort of thing happens several times, but the first time it happens is that cut from the junkyard to the control room.  The kind of story that is told is fundamentally shaped by its material production.  Later, the kinds of stories that are being told demand new developments in how stories can be told.  The dialectic starts here.

This is analogous (I’ll go no further than that) to one aspect of how history itself works.  The productive forces determine (in the soft sense) the ideas and relations built upon them; then they come into conflict and new ideas arise that demand new developments in the productive forces. It’s fitting to find this analogy in the clockwork of a show that puts so much stress on history.  It does stress history, by the way, even when it moves away from ‘historicals’ and into SF.  Its mode of SF is essentially allegorical and utopian.  And that too is fitting, because of those eccentric and impossible spaces of British fantastic children’s literature upon which the show is so reliant.  In the post-war era, those spaces became gateways to newly-imagined social pasts, presents and futures.  Under the rubble, rabbit holes might lead to a New Jerusalem.

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The Doctor picks up a sharp rock.  Ian evidently suspects that the Doctor intends to do something brutally pragmatic and brain Za with it.  The Doctor claims he wanted to ask Za to draw a map back to the ship.

Either way, the Doctor saw a rock and decided to use it as a tool.  Given that this story is about ‘cavemen’ who are dying out because they’ve forgotten how to use their own technology, I think this is pretty big.…

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The Doctor has refused Enlightenment.  Turlough is nonchalantly (rather too nonchalantly) picking at his fingernails when the White Guardian offers him a share.

“It’s a diamond,” he says, staring at the massive, glowing crystal, “The size!  It could buy a galaxy. I can have that?”

The White Guardian tells him he can.

“I would point out,” interjects the Black Guardian, “that under the terms of our agreement, it is mine… unless, of course, you wish to surrender something else in its place. The Doctor is in your debt for his life. Give me the Doctor, and you can have this,” he indicates the crystal, “the TARDIS, whatever you wish.”

Turlough is evidently extremely tempted.  He has to struggle with himself.  When he shoves it towards the Black Guardian, it couldn’t be more obvious that he is angry and disappointed with the choice he feels have has to make.

“Here,” he shouts petulantly, burying his face, “take it!”

Even so, he does make that choice.

The Black Guardian bursts into flames and vanishes, gurgling and screaming.

“Light destroys the dark,” comments the White Guardian.  “I think you will find your contract terminated,” he tells Turlough.

Turlough takes a smaller crystal from his trouser pocket.  It’s the one the Black Guardian gave him to seal their bargain.  It has turned back, charred by the same flames that consumed the Black Guardian.  Turlough drops it.

“I never wanted the agreement in the first place,” he mutters.

Tegan is sceptical.

“You believe him because he gave up Enlightenment for your sake,” she tells the Doctor.

“You’re missing the point,” the Doctor says, “Enlightenment was not the diamond. Enlightenment was the choice.”

Well, isn’t that twee.

Except that it’s a bit more grounded that it sounds.

Listen to the words everyone’s been using.  Diamond.  Buy.  Terms.  Agreement.  Contract.  Mine.  Debt.  This is the language of trade, of commerce, of business, of employment, of property, of value and wealth and commodification.  Turlough has been desperately trying to wriggle out of a contract, a job.  He was basically coerced into it and given a misleading description of what it entailed.  He responded by slacking off, dragging his feet, working to rule, fobbing off the boss with endless excuses.  The boss got sick of this and tried to sack him.  Then, Turlough was presented with an opportunity to take up an altogether more alluring contract.  This time, it was a straightforward deal: a dirty great jewel of immense value (Turlough immediately conceives of it in monetary terms) in exchange for a crude hit.  No illusions.  No lies.  Just kill this guy you know to be pretty decent in return for a big pay-off.

He started the story leaning over a chessboard, moving pieces around, deciding which pawn to sacrifice in the cause of winning the game.  He ends the story leaning over a table, staring at a prize, given the option to pick it up in exchange for sacrificing one piece.   And he can’t do it.

This refers to more than just Good vs.…

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“My goodness…” says the Doctor as yet more fine fare is brought to the Tharils already-laden table, “You live like kings.”

“We are kings,” says Biroc impassively.  He merely states it as a fact.  He is both part of this feast and an observer of it.  He was at it, and now he returns later in his personal timeline.  He can travel along his own trajectory.  He sits at a table he once sat at long ago, in the same seat.  He acknowledges this past life and does not disown it, yet he does not embrace it either.  His tone is neutral.  Truthful.

Meanwhile, at the same table many years later, after history has revolved, men – who make their living capturing, chaining and shipping creatures like Biroc for sale and industrial use – are sitting down for their lunch break.  They pass round sandwiches, pickles, thermos flasks.

Their boss, Rorvik, regards them with the wary contempt that only a truly stupid person can feel for those slightly more stupid than he is.  He has so little success trying to make them listen to his inanities that he has to wave his blaster pistol at them. 

Back in the ‘past’, back at the other meal, the Doctor asks where all the Tharils’ luxury and variety comes from.

“The universe is our garden,” says Biroc simply.  Again, the abrupt tone of factual statement.

“Ah. So this is what it was all like.”

“At the height of our empire, before the Tharils became the slaves of men.”

The mention of slaves turns the Doctor’s mind instantly to the servants moving around the table.  He responds to Biroc’s barely-implied complaint by calling him out on his apparent hypocrisy.

“I notice you don’t do too badly for staff,” says the Doctor.  “This garden of yours, the universe… how do you manage it”

“We use our power.  For those who travel on the time winds, the vastness of space is no obstacle.”  The Tharils have the power to travel where they will – the basic requirement of any imperial project.  “Everything is ours.”

The serving girl by the Doctor makes a mistake, spilling the wine that she is pouring into a goblet.  The Tharil whose goblet it is knocks her to the floor, as one swipes irritably at a fly.  The Doctor glares at him and gets up to help the young woman.

“Including her?” he asks.

“They’re only people.”  Again, Biroc’s tone is flat.  He does not endorse or condemn… except in so far that simply saying such things is its own condemnation.  He simply recites the truth of how this system operated.  To the Tharils, their slaves were only people… just as, to Rorvik, his slaves are only Tharils.  But there is no self-justification from Biroc.  He makes no pleas, and gives no excuses.  Rorvik is losing control of his present.  Biroc owns his past. 

“So you’re the masters the Gundan spoke of, hmm? The enslavers?”

“The weak enslave themselves, Doctor. You and I know that.” …

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In an opulent throne room, the Doctor and Romana are being entertained by Zargo and Camilla, two of the Three Who Rule.  Plates are loaded with meat.  Glasses are filled with dark red wine.  The Lords are draped in fine fabrics and smeared in make-up to mask their strangely pallid faces.

“Well, you certainly do very well for yourselves here,” observes the Doctor.

“We struggle to retain some remnants of civilisation,” says Zargo, who evidently considers himself civilised.

“Well, you do better than the peasants,” remarks the Doctor.  He and Romana have recently been in a peasant hovel, where the half-starved, over-worked, rag-clad people reacted in terror at their aristocratic confidence.

“The peasants are simple folk,” observes Camilla drily, “Richer fare would only distress them.”

“Quite right,” says the Doctor.  (His pronunciation makes it sound more like ‘Quite trite.‘)  “Probably give them indigestion,” he continues, “There’s nothing worse than a peasant with indigestion. Makes them quite rebellious. I hear you’ve been having trouble that way.”

“There are always a few ungrateful ones who do not appreciate all that we do for them,” agrees Camilla, without a trace of irony.

“And what do you do for them, apart from saving them from gluttony?” asks Romana, with more than a trace of irony.

The Lords claim to “protect” their people; they are unspecific about how, or from what.  It turns out that they protect their people from “the Wasting”.  But the Lords – a gang of literal vampires – are the Wasting.  They are what sucks all opportunity for progress out of the system, making their world (in Romana’s phrase) “a society that evolves backwards”.  All wealth, all that is farmed and harvested, is appropriated by them from the people who farm and harvest it.  The lifeblood of society flows upwards to them where they consume it, wear it, sit comfortably upon it.  They store the literal blood of the peasants in their giant fuel tanks, like the stolen surplus that it is. 

There was nothing progressive about Roman aquaducts (the water went to the fountains of the rich) or pyramids (they were the tombs of kings, stuffed with the wealth they wanted to take with them), or any of the other monuments that ruling classes throughout history have built to themselves.  Such rulers have always claimed to be protecting the people they leech off.  But every last ruling class in history has been a great vampire, feeding upon a wasting disease of which they are themselves the primary symptom.…

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The Cut

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On ‘The Space Museum’

Recently, while tracking some hits this blog received, I discovered a new Doctor Who podcast called Pex Lives.  It’s great stuff, well worth listening to… and I’m not just saying that because the guys who make it – Kevin Burns and James Murphy – kindly linked to me and mentioned me in one of the episodes.  Their third and latest podcast is just out, and centres upon ‘The Krotons’.  Their second podcast is about ‘The Space Museum’ and they delve into the piece with lots of wit (in both senses of the word) alongside anarchism, Tolstoy, progress and political change.  Not many Who podcasts touch on stuff like this.  My favourite quote: “we’re both ambivalent about violent revolution”.  (For the record, so am I.)   It also helps that they both have likeable voices.  Kevin sounds like Terry Gilliam (i.e. he has one of those American voices that sounds as though it is filtered through a permanent grin of enthusiasm) and James sounds like a gigantic, sentient, wryly raised eyebrow that has somehow gained the ability to talk with the voice of a hip-hop DJ.  Even so, I kept on wanting to interrupt them… which I mean as a compliment.  So I made some notes instead, and they turned into this:

1. Freeze Frame

The Doctor, Vicki, Barbara and Ian spend episode one wandering around the museum unseen and unheard, unable to interact with events and apparently seeing glimpses of their own future, culminating in their encountering themselves as exhibits. The explanation for this is that they’ve “jumped a time track” and arrived before their arrival, so to speak. Vicki ponders what this means in a speech that, as the Pexcasters remark, is as poetic as it is scientifically meaningless:

Time, like space, although a dimension in itself, also has dimensions of its own.

However, I think that “time”, as used here, really refers to narrative, particularly TV narrative. One of those inner dimensions of narrative is, of course, metaphor. So when Vicki uses the word “time” metaphorically to refer to TV narrative (hereafter TVN), and thus says that narrative has dimensions of its own, she identifies one of those dimensions by using it.

But let’s look at the moment when the ‘time track’ is ‘jumped’. This happens at the very beginning of part one, which is also a reprise of the cliffhanger at the end of ‘The Crusade’.  This cliffhanger was a sudden and uncanny ‘freezing’ of the characters.  The Doctor & Co. are still frozen in their medieval duds at the beginning of ‘Space Museum’.  They then unfreeze in their regular clothes (Ian in suave catalogue menswear, Vicki in teenybopper pop-socks, Barbara in her oh-so-practical cardigan, and the Doctor in his usual quasi-Edwardian proto-Adam Adamant gear). The Doctor, upon being questioned about this by the baffled Ian, says that the answer is “time and relativity, dear boy”.

This ‘jump’ occurs at the junction of two stories, one ending and the other starting.  At the start of the new TVN, the characters are still, so to speak, stuck at the end of the last TVN. …

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That Isn’t Right

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It occurs to me that this post (in which I had a go at ‘The Reign of Terror’ for giving us a thoroughly reactionary and misleading picture of the French Revolution) should’ve been called ‘That Isn’t Right’. So I’ve given that title to this post instead, which is also about all manner of wrongness in the representation of history.

I wasn’t going out on much a limb dissing ‘The Reign of Terror’ (the acronym of which is TROT, amusingly enough); nobody is terribly attached to it.  ‘The Aztecs’, by contrast, is one of those stories that fan opinion tends to think of as irreducibly Good.  It isn’t that everybody likes it, but anyone trying to say that it’s Bad definitely has the burden of proof upon them.

I’m not actually going to say that it’s bad, as such.  On the whole, it’s very well made.  But….

Black and White and Red All Over

“Tell me, Aged Servant of Yetaxa…
do you approve of interracial marriage?”

Firstly, the Aztecs are played by white people.  It’s not easy to tell for sure, but it looks like at least some of the actors are ‘darked-up’ (what would you call it… bronzeface?).  It seems probable, from looking at colour photos of the actors on set, that they’ve been reddened.  But even if they weren’t actually made-up, they were still representing Aztecs one way or another.  Costume, ostensibly ‘native’ mannerisms and speech patterns, etc.  It amounts to the same thing, or at least something very similar.  Remember, not all blackface involves actual ‘darking-up’.  These days, many understand the word and its variants to connote any situation in which the dominant culture reveals its inbuilt privilges (i.e. racism, ableism) by having someone not in an oppressed group representing that oppressed group, whether in overtly parodic form or not.  As China Miéville has observed, the Armstrong & Miller RAF sketches (while funny, at least once upon a time) employ a deeply reactionary verbal “modern blackface” by putting speech idioms associated with young, urban kids (who, if they’re not black, have supposedly absorbed aspects of black culture and speech) into the mouths of ‘the Few’, thus implicitly comparing today’s supposedly self-obsessed, aimless, pampered, ‘entitled’ youngsters with the generation of the “finest hour”.  Miéville points out that such juxtapositions (old, white, middle/upper class guys ‘putting on’ verbal fancy dress such as “innit”) are the standard obsession of Radio 4 comedy panel shows.  The more overtly sinister version of these same assumptions was expressed with typically boorish reactionary truculence by Dr David Starkey on Newsnight after the riots in 2011.

While blackface and its variants were on the wane in America from the 50s onwards (even before the rise of the Civil Rights Movement, which of course sharpened such unease), the use of ‘darking-up’ was less likely to be seen as problematic in Europe when ‘The Aztecs’ (and other similar historical stories of the same era) got made.  Even so, it’s far too glib to say that there was no way anyone at the BBC could have questioned the practice. …

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Apocalypse Below (or The Tractate Face-Off)

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From Panic Moon, July 2011.  Edited, and with new material in a seprate coda.


This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end
Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end

At first, ‘Frontios’ seems like the odd one out amongst Christopher H. Bidmead’s Doctor Who scripts. Unlike ‘Logopolis’ and ‘Castrovalva’, it’s overtly political and doesn’t seem to be powered by any underlying scientific concept. Also, it has monsters in it.

Bidmead included monsters – reluctantly – at the insistence of John Nathan-Turner.  On reflection, this seems a dodgy call. Monsters from Bidmead were always going to be too concept-heavy to realise properly on screen. Sure enough, he comes up with giant woodlice that can disguise themselves as rocks until they unexpectedly uncurl… which was never gonna look good on the day.

Apparently finding the macabre more fascinating than he expected, Bidmead also included alien machines made with bits of corpses. This was very tuned in to the then-current turn towards biomechanics and ‘body horror’ in the fantasy genre, but it proved too horrific for Doctor Who to attempt on screen (though it livens up the novelisation).

The politics is also a departure. Aside from Tegan’s worries about sweatshops in ‘Logopolis’ and the hilarious sexism of the Castrovalvans, previous Bidmead scripts seem politically detached. He’s a world-builder, but not in the utopian or dystopian manner. So ‘Frontios’ comes a little out of leftfield… though that’s the only leftish thing about it. I’ve no idea what Bidmead’s own politics may be, but ‘Frontios’ seems to say that the ordinary people require stern discipline, that they want and need confident rulers. The story frowns on the ‘every man for himself’ ethic, yet implies that only hierarchy and obedience stand between society and what Hobbes described as the “war of all against all”.

In the absence of Plantagenet, there is “anarchy”, with the colonists turning to looting with a rapidity that is almost funny. Thrown “outside the system”, Cockerill is quickly attacked by ravening ‘Retrogrades’. However, when he apparently defeats the hungry earth, Cockerill is eagerly adopted as a replacement leader by the mob. Meanwhile, Plantagenet’s bravery proves he is genetically fit to rule (he is, after all, named after a line of kings). Brazen – the personification of authority – ultimately proves himself admirable, his noble final words being “that’s an order!”.

Actually, I think ‘Frontios’ has more in common with ‘Logopolis’ than it appears.  Bidmead never takes the series into the past – he’s too aware of entropy as ‘time’s arrow’ to believe that you can go backwards – and his view of the far future is one of maximum entropy. The “failure proof technology” that failed, the dwindling population, the wrecked ship, the malfunctioning generator, the “doomed planet Earth”, etc. Mine shafts collapse.  Lights stop working. The TARDIS falls apart. Even “eaten by the earth” sounds like a metaphor for putrefaction.

The politics reflects this state of decay. Order becomes disorder as Orderlies become disorderly.…

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